Jonathan Kim
I chose to focus on the plinth for Project 3. The plinth functions as a public community space that connects the various program spaces of the site. As a central body, the plinth's design focuses on accessibility into and out of the site and offers spaces for community and individual gathering to the local public. This design focus influences the plinth's relationship with inside and outside spaces and how people can freely transition from one another. With that in mind, I primarily concetrated the design on the accesibility and public spaces of the plinth as the main functional aspects while also exploring relationships with vegetation and structure. This began with zoning our group's programs into circular areas, which continued with a central circular space in the plinth that creates S-like circulations between the different zones. By elevating some of these zones, the plinth then can either connect to the ground floor or transition to the plinth's top, creating points of entrance under and over the plinth through escalting stairs that stretch in between the zones on the site's four sides. The plinth's top and bottom are then connected through green openings filled with trees and plants that not only let light and air circulate through the plinth but that also offer structural support via columns. These different design relationships can be best seen with an exploded axonemtric of the plinth, whcih focuses on the first level of the whole site.
When first starting this project, our group's research focused on the redensification of the low income communities in the Bronx, the birthplace of hip hop. As we moved forth in our project, our design's goals gradually shifted but through the plinth's design, I tried to represent some of our starting research and design points, which included having various circulation routes, spaces for personilization for local food venders and artists, open visibility across the site, and limited hidden spaces. This can be seen with the stairs of the plinth. The plinth consists of four stairs on each site's side that leads to a central space both on the ground level and plinth's top. Each stair is about 3 ft wide, which offers a space for public seating throughout the site. To give more functionality to the stairs that take up such a large portion of the plinth's deisgn, the stairs were scatterd with booleaned boxes that act as passageways into the plinth, openings for trees, and platforms and public spots for public gathering. By opening up different points of the stairs, people have visibility in and out of the plinth and more routes to enter and leave the site and program spaces, which include an art gallery, a playground, and a commercial shopping space by local street markerters. Additionally, these box spaces are generalized to be used for a wide variety of options, offering potential for personilzation by the community. With placing vegetation throughout these openings both on the stairs and on the plinth's central zone, the sites becomes a more breathable space. These different points of accessibility and vegetation are met with public seating and activites that allow the plinth to become a vital interactive design for the overal public engagment of the site and program.